A dad's guide to cooking and malnourishment

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Month: November 2016

The best part of thanksgiving is, without question, the sales afterword. No, I’m not talking about electronic gizmos and other random junk. I’m talking about taking a stroll through the meat department at the supermarket. You can absolutely pick up ham or turkey for half the price they were a week prior to the holiday. Nothing makes me feel like I’m husbanding quite so well as getting a 50% discount on a hunk of meat. The biggest challenge with this is, of course, that the family has already been consuming leftover ham and turkey for the better part of a week and are not going to be well pleased when presented with MORE TURKEY.

The truth is, I don’t really care. Feeding the family on the cheap is an occupational necessity. I am not made of money, and if people would turn the lights off when leaving a room or just wear a sweater, I might just have more money to spend on tasty and exotic foods. As it is, the only reason we’re not eating beans and rice every night is a direct result of my economic vigilance at the grocery store. Which I’m not very good at, so it’s a pretty minor help, but I do try. Anyhow. Here is an interesting recipe I knocked up using bits of cooked turkey and fresh herbs I had left over in the fridge. You could also use the leftover second (half-priced) turkey you got from the store the week after Thanksgiving.

Cut an X in each fresh chestnut & roast in the oven at 425F for 30 min. Flip once at about 15 min. Let the chestnuts cool a bit and shell them. Slice them into chunks, discarding any moldy ones.

Heat up the turkey and sliced mushrooms just so the mushrooms start to cook and reduce in size.

Add rice, herbs, a bit of salt, pepper, and garlic powder to the Chicken Broth in a large pot. Heat to boiling and add the chestnuts, turkey, and mushrooms. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer until all of the water has been absorbed – this takes anywhere between 45min and 1hr.

Serve alongside some sort of veggie, like asparagus, and some leftover cranberry relish.

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Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that is more about tradition
than anything else. It’s why those weird sweet potatoes with the
marshmallows on top is prepared for so many tables even though it’s
not even an outside consideration for any other meal of the year. I
mean, until I was an adult, I never even knew you could eat sweet
potatoes on days other than Thanksgiving. The point is, every family
has a favorite dish, and if that dish isn’t on the table when everyone
takes their seat, it’s not Thanksgiving. In our household, Grandma
Shafer’s rolls are one of those dishes. We make them every year,
whether Thanksgiving is at my house or someone else’s. What’s
interesting about this recipe isn’t the unique dense texture and
sweet-yeasty flavor; it’s in the making. The real tradition is in the
preparation. Every year, for as long as I can remember, my mom would
forget the recipe, and never the day or week before when it could
conveniently be obtained through a casual search and phone call. This
fact was always discovered when it was 30 minutes after we should have
started them. At this point, Grandma Shafer or Aunt Kim would be
called in to save the day, after pleasantries.

Of course, this is only part of the tradition. Once that recipe was
located, and the dough made and readied for baking, everyone would be
called in to the kitchen with calls of “Grease your hands,” amongst
grumbling and muttering. Then everyone would cover their hands in oil,
roll the dough into small balls, and drop them in threes in muffin
tins. In the end, we’d get our rolls and all would be well with the
dinner table. And also breakfast and lunch for the next few days,
because this recipe makes a prodigious number of rolls and they’re
awesome left over.

Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and, with your hand mixer,
beat at medium speed for 2 minutes.

Add 1 egg and 1 3/4 cup flour. At high speed, beat for 2 minutes.

Stir in 3 1/2 cups of flour (this is best done by hand. If you use
your hand mixer for this part, you are guaranteed to break it).

Spread 3/4 cups of flour on wax paper, or wherever you want to knead
the dough, and pour the batter onto it. Knead until smooth and
stretchy.

Let the dough rise in a greased and covered bowl for 1 hour. Punch the
dough down and let rise for another hour. In greased muffin tins,
place three dough balls in each spot, and let rise for another hour.

Bake at 425 for about 6 minutes, or until done.

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I like to cook with ginger, and against all odds, the kids like eating stuff with ginger. The problem, as is always the case, is that I’ve got 45 minutes or less to prepare and serve dinner. When a recipe calls for ginger root it basically knocks the meal out of contention for an easy after work/school meal. I suppose I could go and buy one of those $5 tubes of pre-pureed ginger, but really, it goes about two meals and it’s so full of other preservatives to maintain color and whatever, I don’t actually feel like I’m doing the right thing. Plus, that would require planning, and I can tell you good intentions (aka: grabbing a ginger root off the shelf) are way easier than planning. At least for me. Anyhow, I’ve got a middle-ground that also manages to sort out the problem of garlic at the same time. It’s a piece of cake and you can totally knock it together after a day of mopping, sweeping, cursing and threats of death and destruction.

All you need is a decent sized ginger root, peeled and cut into 3/4″-1″ cubes – you’re aiming for about a dozen of these. Also a medium sized garlic clove, peeled. Toss the whole mess into a food processor until it’s as pasty as you want it. If you want to get pastier, add a bit of olive oil after you’ve minced it, stir that around with a spoon and go back after it with the food processor.

Then, use 1-2 Tbsp in whatever recipe is calling for ginger. I also use it extensively in stir-fry. It keeps for weeks in the fridge and while it does acquire a sort of greenish tinge, I assure you, it’s still perfectly fine. unless it’s been there for a year and also has a small colony of semi-sentient beings taking a foothold on the surface.

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I’m starting to think that Sunday is really the only day I’ve got the stomach or attention span to cook. Not that I don’t have the stomach or attention span to eat the rest of the week, it’s just that when you’re in a household with children and two working parents, there just isn’t time to enjoy cooking, or cook, or think about what to cook. Most days you roll in the door at quarter after 5, and set to getting something resembling a meal on the table by about 6. That’s like 45 minutes to actually prepare. I’m not even sure you can routinely get a batch of hamburger helper to cook up in that span of time. Do people still eat that? It was basically a child-hood staple for me and I haven’t eaten it in over 20 years.

I can almost always have dinner on the table when it’s plain noodles – which my children and wife are generous enough to allow me to pass off as a perfectly acceptable option. It gets dicier when I try to get fancy. In the summer, I’ve got the luxury of tossing some chicken on the grill and nuking some canned green-beans, that goes over reasonably well because I can alternate between barbecue sauce, various non barbecue marinades, or olive-oil and spices. Winter is a little more difficult. I can still get away with chicken in the oven, but it takes a lot longer and roughly 94.2% of the time, I’ve forgotten to either pull the chicken from the freezer or ask my wife to before she leaves for work. Without defrosted chicken, it’s either Dave’s special ‘Damn-near everything from a can’ tacos, or plain noodles, which you can only do once a week each.

Last week was no exception to this rule. I cooked ham on Sunday, spaghetti on Monday, fast-food on Tuesday, Wednesday was crock-pot day, so my wife threw leftover ham and beans into the crock-pot, and Thursday I didn’t even bother with a meal. So, today, I decided that we needed something approximating nutrition, or at least a dinner that resembled a home-cooked meal. Unfortunately, I also wanted to wallow in self-pity over my failure to get a book published, avoid house cleaning, and play a bit of classic video games. The obvious way to manage all of these, and still end up with good food at the end, is the crock-pot. I selected a recipe from the chicken book, modified it to include only ingredients I have on hand, adding a few others for good measure, and converted the whole thing into a crock-pot meal. Here is what I came up with:

Ingredients:

A bunch of chicken (I used like 5 Thighs and about as many drumsticks)

3 cans of Diced Tomatoes

1 medium yellow onion (diced)

2 Tbsp Italian seasoning

1/2 cup pitted & quartered kalamata olives

2 tsp garlic powder

1/4 cup wine (use a nice one, I prefer Black Box)

Directions:

Throw all that stuff into the crock pot, I didn’t even bother defrosting the chicken. Cook on low for 7.5 hours and serve over jasmine rice. That’s it. It took longer to work out what ingredients we had than to prepare and cook it. Cheers!

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** This article will be published in the 11/16 Edition of the Seward Journal Newspaper **

As I write this, Thanksgiving is two weeks away. I am, or was, super excited about having my family all in the same place for the festivities. After Tuesday, however, I think festivities is a rather generous expectation for the day. The best analogy I can come up for the proceedings is the past week on social media, specifically Facebook. If you think about it, Facebook is just a giant Thanksgiving dinner table. Think about it, all of your friends and family are going to be there along with at least a few people only one other person knows. Everyone is listening to all the conversations and, for better or worse, looking to jump in on one. Undoubtedly, someone will lead with a prayer meme before everybody goes around throwing up memes about what they’re thankful for. After that comes the food pictures and recipie discussions. Maybe you’ll get pleseant conversation about the kids, which leads to one person gushing about their job and everyone else complaning heartily about theirs. Eventually though, the politics memes start. It’s going to start subtly by someone tossing out a funny meme about the candidate they didn’t support, which they also imagine, incorrectly, everyone else will find funny too. Then there’s a response, and the whole dinner table starts to roll down hill until, eventually, at least two people are shouting and the rest of us are chasing the wine to the bottom of the bottle, and reaching for the liquor cabinet. At the end of it someone will throw their hands up and storm out, with the standard, ‘I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while’, and a few others will walk away from the proceedings and go back to posting about the Seahawks again.

This year, that’s where we’re at, pretty much all of us, I think. I’m super optimistic that after already reaching the point of angry red-faced shouting on Facebook, everyone knows to not bring up politics for even a second, it’s a slippery slope. In any case, if it does get there, because it will, I’ve got the perfect recipie that you can knock up by just throwing ingredients into a blender.

Put all of that into a blender, and it’ll be fine if your huffing and puffing and shouting or totally distracted and thinking about this argument or that. If you like, you can throw in a few tablespoons of Grand Marnier.

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*This article first appeared in the 8/24/2016 edition of The Seward Journal Newspaper*

This week was one of those weeks. You know, the sort of week where a
bottle of cheap wine and carton of ice-cream is not only a perfectly
acceptable meal choice, it’s the perfect ratio of comfort-food to
energy expended. As much as the kiddos would have loved cartons of
ice-cream for dinner, it would have resulted in my week having gone
from pretty bad, to epically bad. Needless to day, dinners consisted
largely of emptying cans and boxes into pots and declaring it dinner.
The only comforting thing about that was the fact I didn’t have to do
much more than grunt at the stove for a minute. A much more preferable
meal for any one of those days would have been an Irish stout steak
pie. Real comfort food.

This recipe is brought to you by a conglomeration of things found onallrecipies.com. You can even find the base recipe out there, if you
want to see how they did it. While this recipe isn’t the most
difficult thing you could knock together, it does take several hours
to prepare and cook, so be ready for that. I had fully intended to
tweak it to improve the outcome and validate what I’m about to put
down here, but the tweaks are all about delivery, the flavor is fine.

Put the lard and bacon into a large skillet over medium heat until the
lard melts – at this point, drop in the floured steak cubes and cook
until brown. Transfer this into a 13×9 casserole dish. Cook onions and
mushrooms in the same skillet until the onions are brown and mushrooms
tender. Add the onions and mushrooms to the steak and bacon mix. Stir
in the Irish stout, parsley, cranberries and brown sugar into the mix.
Cover and bake in the oven for about 2 1/2 hours.

If you’re going to make the crust from scratch, now would be the time
to whip up the dough. I’ve doubled the recipe, and that should be
enough, but if you find it doesn’t quite work, make more using the
same proportions described above.

Mix the flour and lard with a pastry blender until crumbly. Do not add
all of the water! add a little more than half of the water and mix by
hand. Continue adding water until the dough holds together. At this
point, I like to separate the dough into balls, cover and refrigerate
them for a bit so they roll out easier and stick less. In this case,
you’ll be making the bottom and top for 2 9” pies.

Remove the casserole dish from the oven and increase the temperature
to 400F. If the gravy doesn’t thicken after the bake, use flour or
corn starch to finish it up. I recommend flour as corn starch can make
the texture of your filling a little slimy.

On a floured surface, roll-out the bottoms for your pies and line your
two 9” pie-pans with them. Bake in the oven until lightly brown.
Remove from the oven and add the filling then cover with another layer
of rolled-out dough. Put the pies back into the oven until golden
brown, about 10-15 minutes.